


The Girl Who Was Lost

by bellaaanovak



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Victorious
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Best Friends, F/M, Fluff, Implications of Depression, Mild Language, Nostalgia, Original planet, POV First Person, Pining, Reminiscing, Unrequited Love, mentions of past companions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4032424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellaaanovak/pseuds/bellaaanovak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Jade West. I’m nineteen years old and I'm from Los Angeles, California, Earth. I traveled with the Doctor. This is the story of how I was lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> For Kara. My beautiful angelic platonic soul mate, who I also want to kiss and get drunk with. Thank you for introducing me to the incredible character that is Jade West and also collaborating with me on creating the most devastatingly gorgeous and sad AU ever. I love you ♥

It started out so easily.

 

I ran away with a strange man wearing sad eyes and a bow tie. He hardly ever talked about his past, but I could tell he had been through a lot. He had lost people – a lot of people. Sometimes he would mention people who had traveled with him before. Some of them left him, some of them died, and some of them were lost.

 

I never thought I would be one of them.

 

The Doctor needed someone. I was only with him for a year. Well, not on Earth. From the day I ran into his TARDIS to my last day on Earth, two weeks had passed. Imagine that: a whole year in just two weeks. My last birthday was on the TARDIS. My next one is going to be on Colossus III, the planet I'm on.

 

The year is 3215. Everyone I have ever known is dead, buried somewhere on Earth. Beck. Beck is dead. I miss him more than I ever thought I would. The worst part is they all died mourning me.

 

My parents must have noticed when I didn't come home after a while. Even my father, who couldn't even look at me because he hated me so much. Even Tori, who I really cared about even though I pretended not to. I still care. The Doctor taught me that. He taught me to care heavily for everyone because you never know when you might lose them.

 

I wish he hadn't taken his own advice.

 

The Doctor cared so deeply despite losing so much. The last time I saw him he was smiling. I'll hold on to the last words he ever said to me forever, and I hate myself for it.

 

But more of that later. Let me start at the beginning.


	2. Chapter One

The first place the Doctor ever took me was Mars. I never thought I would get to go to _Europe,_ let alone _Mars._ The red planet – it was so surreal. We didn't even need spacesuits or anything. I guess the TARDIS gives off some kind of oxygen field and also translates alien languages. It's pretty cool.

 

So, Mars. We didn't travel in time or anything, just in space. For a minute I thought we would be spotted by Curiosity or one of the satellites, but the Doctor assured me in passing NASA was on his side. I was dumbfounded; it was incredible. I remember how in awe I was of the whole thing. I could see the Earth from the surface, and it was like seeing the Moon from Earth. It was amazing; I couldn't fucking believe it. The Doctor said it happened often with his companions. It surprised me when he said he had other people traveling with him. He looked so young.

 

That was before I learned he was actually, like, a thousand years old.

 

The Doctor explained the regeneration process to me and it took some time but I finally got it. He changed his body and face to prevent himself from dying. I told him it was a bit narcissistic and egotistical, and he was less than excited about my knowledge of psychology.

 

_“Don't you go to a performing arts high school?”_

_“Yes. So?”_

_“You sound like one of my therapists.”_

_“You have multiple therapists?”_

_“Yes. So?”_

_“Touché.”_

Honestly, that was the moment I realized I wanted to travel with him. I mean _really_. He had problems. The guy had lost so much. A thousand years don't go by without some tragedy. One time I told him I had some tragedy in my short life and then spent a day on Earth, and the next time I saw him, not a few hours later for me, he just seemed… older. Sadder. Darker.

 

Dark circles adorned his eyes and he just looked at me in a way I didn't like. Nothing bad towards me… just. _At_ me. He would stare at me when I wasn't looking, but not like Robbie stared at Cat when she wasn’t looking. It took two months, some convincing, and almost getting trapped under the ice in Europa’s ocean, but he finally told me why he had that look about him.

 

The Doctor went through my life like he was reading a fucking book.

 

He skipped around from when I was born until a few months before I left with him. God, I was so pissed. I was livid, going on about personal space and privacy and then I just had to ask what he saw. The Doctor saw my father’s face fall when his prodigal son turned out to be a girl. He saw him pick up his first drink. He saw my mother raising me until I was two and then my dad coming back with a “changed heart” or something. He saw it get worse. He saw me spill orange juice on the divorce papers. He saw me smoking my first cigarette. I don’t know how, some complicated thing with time and how a lot of it isn't fixed, but he was the stranger who held my hand when I was fourteen and on the subway by myself and scared of a group of older guys staring at me. He saw me meet Beck. He saw my audition for Hollywood Arts. He saw my play. He saw everything. I was livid. I was so ashamed.

 

I must have had such a terrible life compared to his. He saved worlds and traveled in time and space. Never tied down? Sounded like the kind of life I wanted to live. He didn't talk about them a lot, but he really did have a lot of other companions. I used to hate when he’d bring them up, especially in passing or something. There was one woman he brought up the most, Rose. Rose, wherever you are, I hope you're found again. He said you were lost, too.

 

God, he got so mad at me one night after I had a party on the TARDIS. Of course I couldn't invite anyone who knew me or could really talk about what happened because of some kind of perception filter. All these teenagers from 2427 London thought it was just a warehouse rave. The whole ship was trashed. Luckily, the TARDIS closed off a lot of important rooms and stuff, but when the Doctor got back, I may have accidentally locked him in a closet after I’d had a few drinks. I could practically hear the ship laughing at me when I had to go unlock the closet after the party. The Doctor lectured me and talked about _her_ again.

 

 _“Rose once got so mad at me after I accidentally left her and her old boyfriend, Mickey, on this ship, the_ Madame Pompadour _. I brought a banana to a party with the real Madame Pompadour and partied for a while. The killer robots wanted her brain, but I saved the day. Sort of.”_

_“Killer robots?!”_

_“Did I not mention that before? Okay, alright, the point is: always bring a banana to a party. No! Don't throw parties on the TARDIS!”_

I tried not to get jealous, but after knowing him for a while I couldn't help it. I was still in love with Beck, not the Doctor, but I wanted him to myself. What bugged me the most wasn't that there were others before me; it was that there were probably going to be others after me.

 

As of now… I don't know where the Doctor is. I don't know if he's traveling with somebody else. I've been on this planet for three months. God knows how much time has passed for him. He could be dead. He could have a different face. He could have red hair like he's always wanted. Where are you, Doctor? Why haven't you come back?

 

I miss the Doctor. I miss my friends. It's not so bad on this planet, though… I know bits of the language now. Without the TARDIS, I can't translate, but it's getting easier.

 

Oh. I haven't said how I even got here to begin with, have I? Right! Mars.

 

During that whole year of traveling with the Doctor, we went to so many places. I got to meet John F. Kennedy. I saw a barren planet become a jungle in minutes due to a system-wide rainfall with special natural chemicals that activate all the plant life. The plant life survives for a couple years and then the planet is barren again for hundreds of years. There's no actual life on it, and hardly anyone has ever even witnessed it, but I did. I saw so much. It's hard to believe it all came back to that red planet in my home system.

 

Before the Doctor and I got to Colossus III, we went back to Mars for my birthday. He surprised me for nostalgia’s sake. A few days before my birthday, I found some Gallifreyan dynamite in the Doctor’s things. I had no idea why he had it, but it intrigued the crap out of me because it wasn’t made from Earth’s materials, it was made from Gallifrey’s. Alien dynamite. I considered it an early birthday present from the Time Lords when I shoved some of it into my backpack. I haven’t stolen anything important from the Doctor, except maybe his hearts, but _alien dynamite_! I just had to have it.

 

When we landed on Mars, he put a blindfold on my head and messed up my eye makeup. I was so mad, but I let it go. As soon as I stepped foot onto the surface from the TARDIS, I knew. I could feel the rock under my shoes, I could smell the sand. I knew we were on my favorite planet. I took the blindfold off carefully and hugged the Doctor, telling him thank you a million times over and regrettably not telling him I loved him. I thought it would give him the wrong idea. The Doctor knew I was with Beck, and it would have broken his heart and confused him for days. But now… now that he’s gone, well, now that _I’m_ gone… I wish I would have told him.

 

My mother used to say things like, _“Don’t say ‘would have’, ‘could have’, or ‘should have’. You can’t go back and do it again.”_ But with the Doctor, that statement was invalid. If only I had a time traveling police box.

 

The Doctor needed to know he was loved, so loved. Loved by the mysterious women he talked about all the time, loved by the countless worlds he’d saved, loved by his family who are long gone, and loved by me. He needed to know I would never leave him, because I wasn’t planning to. I wasn’t planning to blow Mars up either, but that kind of happened too.

 

We explored for a little while on Mars circa 2017, only a few years ahead of my time. The Earth was pretty much the same. I had the dynamite in my backpack and I saw this rock about the height of me and it looked really loose. It wasn’t fastened to the planet, just some big red boulder. I was so tempted, so, naturally, I turned to the Doctor and offered what he couldn’t do.

 

_“Let’s blow it up.”_

_“I’m sorry, what?!”_

_“Let’s blow this sucker up! Come on, please, it’ll be so fun. It doesn’t look important.”_

_“You just judged a rock by its… by… its… stone.”_

_“Please, Doctor! It’s my birthday.”_

_“Where – how would you even – how would you blow the rock up, Jade?”_

_“With this.”_

_“Where the hell--”_

_“You really need to put better security in your library.”_

_“I shouldn’t need security; it’s a_ library! _Although, Donna and I once went to this really bizarre library…”_

He talked about the Vashta Nerada for five minutes and how he met his now-dead-ex-wife River, who happened to be the daughter of his former two companions, Amy and Rory – who he talked about especially often – and while he was distracted, I planted two of the dynamite sticks onto the boulder. I pulled him back and ran thirty feet away from the rock and hit the boom button. And oh, was there a boom.

 

This time I really thought we were going to get in trouble with NASA. The rock exploded as we took cover behind an even bigger rock, and the explosion opened up a little crevice in the surface. Not big enough to cause any major problems on the surface, but big enough to be seen from Earth, or so I’ve heard. We stepped closer to the hole, about four feet wide both ways, and were taken aback as an orange flare shot up from the opening, starting a fire. The fire burned only in the opening, nowhere else, and didn’t spread. The Doctor said due to the explosion, a passageway from the center of Mars to the TARDIS’ oxygen field was created, causing a fire that would burn for centuries. When the Doctor was on the phone with NASA trying to explain what happened, it was just the funniest thing ever.

 

_“Captain James, listen, I – Jade and I went to Mars and something happened. Oh, so you know about it. Alright, good, well, at least the Russians don’t know, am I right? Alright, okay, um… yes. It’s not like it’s very large, it’s only about four feet – oh… oh, you can see it from Hawaii’s telescopes. Hm. That puts us in a bit of a pickle, then, eh? Listen, I’ll put a perception filter around it so it doesn’t cause a fuss, but it’ll expire when the TARDIS leaves. Just – I don’t know what to tell the rest of the world, just blame a volcano!”_

For a while, I really thought we were gonna get in trouble – _big_ trouble. The Doctor assured me it’d be fine, but still… Still I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d have gone to Houston instead of just called them from Mars. We might’ve been jailed or something. The Doctor mentioned I was basically a fugitive from the Shadow Proclamation, space police. I thought it was really cool, but he weaned them off of me, too. “Jade West: fugitive of the Shadow Proclamation.” I should write an autobiography and call it that.

 

Well, I don’t know if that flame is still burning. I have very limited contact with anyone outside of Colossus III, and the people who get the most contact are the rich or royal. So, my life, basically. Since I’ve only been here for three months, and I’m kind of on the run, it’s just impossible for me to even try and fit in or gain respect and trust. I have to learn the language first, but luckily, the family the Doctor and I met is letting me stay with them. It’s hard. I miss Los Angeles. I miss the ocean. I miss my friends. I miss pot. I miss McDonald’s. I miss the Doctor. I miss the Doctor. I miss the Doctor. I miss you, Doctor.

 

Please find me soon.


	3. Chapter Two

Colossus III is a forest planet. It is absolutely beautiful. For a while I couldn’t stand to breathe the air – luckily from an oxygen atmosphere. For a while I couldn’t look at the sky without dry heaving. For a while I couldn’t even leave the house I live in. I’m not even really _living_ here… I’m just a stranger on a couch. An alien. I don’t belong here. I belong with the fucking Doctor, but he isn’t here, so I guess I just have to take care of myself.

 

Colossus III is a beautiful forest planet but I hate it with every fiber of my being.

 

The planet orbits two suns. Because of the suns complementing the oxygen atmosphere, plant life is constantly flourishing. In the more barren areas of the planet, where no one really lives, the trees are three times the size of California Redwoods. Everyone has a garden of fruits and vegetables. This is a very healthy society. Why wouldn’t they be? Everyone has a tree up their ass. I digress.

 

When the Doctor and I got here, it wasn’t exactly intentional. We were trying to get to the planet Kantra, a small, tropical planet. I just wanted a little time to relax. No more running, no more explosions, no more yelling, no more saving. For a while I couldn’t move. Now, I’ve never wanted to run more in my life. Kantra is in the _Due Soli_ system in the Tadpole galaxy. It also orbits around the two suns that Colossus III does along with three other planets, which is why the system is called _Due Soli_ – “two suns” in Italian. In fact, Kantra is right next door – about 120,000,000 miles away. Kantra is closer to Colossus III than Earth is to Mars. The only problem with that is Colossus III being utterly cut off from every other system and planet in the universe.

 

Colossus III is gorgeous and the people I _have_ met are lovely, you know, but the entire government is run by a tyrannical dictator who wants to keep other planets away from their resources and incredible amounts of vegetation. The amount of vegetation on this planet could honestly solve Earth’s hunger problem for _centuries_. But if I had the cure to cancer, I’d use it on my grandfather before I opened it up to the entire universe, so I half-understand why the President cut off all ties with everyone else. Bye, granddad. I miss you.

 

Still, though.

 

Some of the children on this planet think they’re the only planet in the galaxy. When I asked them what the stars were, they had no idea. One little girl said she thought the stars were paint speckles on a huge canvas. “Freckles in the sky,” she said. She reminded me of Cat a lot. Except, well, the little girl was green and had microscopic flowers on the tips of her eyelashes. Cat would love her.

 

Because the President wants no part of any other planet, no one gets to get word out to anyone outside of Colossus III. Like I said, the contact is extremely limited even for the rich and elite. The President is apparently extremely paranoid one of his staff will discuss government secrets or conspire to trade resources. How do I know all this? The family I’m living with is very gossipy.

 

Imogen, a mother of two and a widow, has taken me in. The Doctor and I helped her when we accidentally landed here because of the planet’s gravitational pull being so much stronger than Kantra’s. We were just drifting in space above _Due Soli_ and we were planning to just float down onto Kantra to test the waters and not disturb the marine life or the locals but Colossus III’s gravity tugged the TARDIS down through its atmosphere like a meteor. I saw it on the monitor in the console room. It was really cool, but also terrifying. Which, now that I think about it, was pretty much my entire life with the Doctor.

 

The Doctor and I helped Imogen’s son with a bully at his school. She couldn’t handle it herself because she lives in a poorer area and the other kid was picking on him for that. Good to know kids are just as evil light years away as they are on Earth. Alright, but, for once, it felt good to do something so minor in the Doctor’s eyes compared to rebooting the universe. Yeah, when he told me about that, I was a little in disbelief, but he had this look in his eyes that made me believe him. When we landed, we were a couple of miles away from Imogen’s kids’ school. The Doctor said something about children crying, so we comforted Silas, the younger one who was being teased. School was about to end so we took Silas and his older brother, Mason, home.  

 

_“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you, Jade.”_

_“Aw, polite little devils aren’t they?”_

_“Jade, be nice.”_

_“I just have this thing with kids. Except you probably know why because of that one time you sat and watched my entire life and ate popcorn while you did so.”_

_“I said I was sorry for that.”_

_“I know. That doesn’t make it any less devastatingly embarrassing and cruel.”_

We stopped bickering when Imogen opened the door. Her eyes were so wide seeing people not-green, if she were Catholic, she would have done the sign of the cross. Imogen is beautiful, honestly. She might be more beautiful than any human woman I have ever met. Her skin is a pale green shade and her jet black hair flows down to her waist and is always braided or styled with flowers, vines, or leaves. Her eyes are deep blue and sad. Her children look really similar to her, except Silas has dozens of freckles. Every time I see him I think of that little girl I met a few weeks ago. Freckles in the sky.

 

After the Doctor and I explained we crash landed here and she responded with letting us in on the tyrannical ways of President Neodi and how we would be executed if found, we figured it would be best to leave as soon as possible. Imogen wouldn’t let us go without a fabulous dinner and a good night’s rest in thanks for helping Silas confront his bully. The Doctor wanted to object but the food just looked so good. I normally don’t eat very healthy when it comes to Earth’s vegetation, but Colossus III has some of the _best_ fruit and vegetables I’ve ever had.

 

I remember how uncomfortable the Doctor was with us having to share a bed. Imogen had a guest bedroom with the equivalent to a king sized bed smack in the middle of it. I swear, the Doctor was about to build a brick wall to separate the bed half and half. It ended up okay, though, because I woke up in his arms and that was reward enough.

 

He knew I loved somebody else. He knew I wanted to be with Beck. Oh, he knew. It breaks my heart because I think it made him want me more. And now… now that he’s not here, now that I don’t have the opportunity to tell him how I could have felt about him… It breaks my heart even more. I’ve been here long enough he might already be in love with somebody else.

 

Not that I’d mind, of course. I _am_ in love with Beck. Or, am I even in love with him anymore? How can I be in love with a man a thousand years dead? Then again, how could a man a thousand years alive be in love with me?

 

I woke up in the Doctor’s arms and he woke up laughing. We stayed there for a while, just together. The suns hadn’t even risen yet. Well, barely. It was like in the morning when the sky is that pale blue color _just_ before the sun rises and you can feel the air getting warmer by the second and you can taste cigarette smoke trailing up from the ash tray and you can hear dozens of species of birds singing to each other and you can smell burning eggs from the balcony and you can see the flowers on the terrace next door opening up and you are _home_. And the Doctor tightened his arms around me and breathed ever so slowly like it was his last breath and even though he was behind me I could just _feel_ him smile.

 

_“You blew up a boulder on Mars yesterday.”_

And I swear, as soon as we started laughing, the suns came up. _[A/N: FOR KARA, when I wrote this, I thought of you, and said, “God, Kara would love this.”]_

 

Imogen graciously let us freshen up and shower at her home and after we hugged her and her sons goodbye, I really thought it was the last time I’d ever see them. I couldn’t imagine it was the last day I would ever be with the Doctor. We walked for a while and finally found ourselves in the woods where the TARDIS landed. It was a bright morning and there were so many different alien animals I’d never seen before. Some of the leaves on the trees were so sun-fed, they were actually properly blue.

 

I begged the Doctor to let me explore the area for a few minutes before we left. I wish I hadn’t. My curious mind wouldn’t let me rest. He agreed on the condition I would be back in five minutes and when I held my arm out for us to shake on it, he fucking trembled. I shook his hand and as I started to walk away, he gripped it tightly and wouldn’t let go. And he spoke, and he grinned, and I took it for granted.

 

The last words he ever said to me:

 

_“Don’t get lost.”_

I didn’t. I didn’t get lost. I actually stayed perfectly close to the TARDIS. Close enough that I could hear the Doctor yelling. Close enough that he could hear me screaming. Close enough that I could see the bluest blue you’ve ever seen through the trees as the President’s soldiers restrained me because somebody called the police equivalent when they saw us walking to the woods. Close enough that I screamed until I was hoarse for five minutes until I heard the TARDIS wheezing.

 

My best friend was gone in the blink of an eye. Well, not quite a blink. More like having your eyes taped open for five whole minutes while you listen to guns cocking and never knowing if he’s really safe until the noise of that big blue box is ringing in your ears.

 

While the soldiers were distracted, I ran like hell. All the running paid off, I’m actually in quite good shape. I ran like hell away from them and into a small cave they didn’t follow me into. I guess I’m technically a fugitive from three major affiliations now: NASA, the Shadow Proclamation, and Colossus III’s government.

 

Jade West: Fugitive of… Everything.

 

It’s been three months since the worst day of my life. I stayed in that cave until dark, which was a _very_ long time. The suns were out for nineteen hours. I wanted to scream but I thought someone would hear me. After the first few hours I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. I never wanted to leave that cave. I never wanted to see the suns again. I never wanted to hear birds. I never wanted to feel the wind in my hair. I never wanted to taste food. I never wanted to smell freshly cut grass. I wanted to die.

 

But I didn’t. I kept fucking running because I know that’s what the Doctor would’ve wanted me to do. When it got dark, I half-ran/half-walked back to Imogen’s. When I got there she couldn’t understand me anymore, and I couldn’t her. Since the TARDIS was gone, the immediate connection to my mind was severed. No more translating. I got lucky the atmosphere is oxygen because I would have suffocated on the spot if not for the TARDIS. I did my best to explain to Imogen what happened and why I was so filthy, and then when she pointed to the television-like device in her front room, I nearly collapsed onto the floor.

 

The Doctor was on the goddamn nightly news. Imogen tried to sign and speak in severely broken English what the headline said, and I got _INSANE MAGICAL INTRUDERS DISAPPEAR FROM FOREST._ If I still had access to Twitter, I would make “magicalintruder” my username. Anyways, there were cameras pointed at the Doctor as he stood in front of the TARDIS, waving his sonic screwdriver in defense. And then ten guns were pointed at him. He raised his hands and even as they tried to back him into the TARDIS he kept repeating the same thing over and over again:

 

_“I won’t leave without her.”_

I could hear myself screaming in the background. The guns cocked and he admitted defeat, getting into the TARDIS sadly and flying away.

 

I have a little more closure now that I know what happened to him. Still, he could be dead, or worse: ginger. I miss him so much. I miss him every day. I sleep in the guest room and every morning I wake up and it will never be the same as the morning after my birthday. I can only leave Imogen’s house when it’s dark out and soldiers aren’t patrolling. One day I’ll get off this fucking planet. One day I’ll bring the Doctor back and help him take down President Neodi and elect a new leader and form a democracy. One day I’ll be back in my own time, even though I never really will be. I promise.

 

There’s a very slim chance this will make it past the atmosphere, let alone all the way to Kantra in this tiny little everything-resistant probe, but on the off chance it does…

 

Whoever finds this, find _him._ Find the Doctor. Call for help. Summon him. Pray for him. Make a child cry. He will come. Please. Find the Doctor and ask him something for me. It seems silly to ask after all of this… there’s so much else I could possibly want to know. There is so much else I could possibly imagine he has done by now. Find my Doctor and ask him:

 

Is that flame still burning?


End file.
